Date: Mon, 14 Jul 1997 03:00:46 -0700 (PDT) From: William Wong <wwong@wiley.csusb.edu> To: banshee@abattoir.com (John M Vinopal) Cc: questions@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Sullen ESDI drive Message-ID: <199707141000.DAA05476@wiley.csusb.edu> In-Reply-To: <199707140125.SAA08542@abattoir.com> from "John M Vinopal" at Jul 13, 97 06:25:18 pm
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> > > Thanks to the few people who've mailed me with their suggestions on > getting my ESDI drive to boot under FreeBSD; unfortunately it has > come to naught, I believe because my (ancient) bios doesn't have a > user defined setting and the stage 2 freebsd boot really wants to > use those values. > > The curious part of this is that NetBSD can boot just fine on this > machine. I've been comparing the boot blocks which have diverged > somewhat but I'm not a good enough asm coder to discern what some > of the difference might imply. > > Before I give up and install netbsd on this machine, is there any > way I can short circuit the boot block to do what I want (boot;)? > The ESDI disk uses 2 slices, one for the kernel and / such that the > bad144 cylinder is below 1023. The disk is 1224/15/35, and its my > belief that the machine bios has no settings for anything but x/x/17. > This leads me to believe that I could hardcode the sector count and > install a custom bootblock. > > Comments? Should I boot from a floppy which chroots? NFS boot > from another unix machine on the local net? > > -j > > I had the same problem trying to install FreeBSD 2.x on old AT&T 386 machines using 200 Meg. ESDI drives. I was only sucessful when installing FreeBSD 1.1.5.1. Your similar problem has just renewed my interest in trying to resurrect these old machines. :) Maybe we could start with 1.1.5.1 and find out why it is successful. -- William T. Wong Cal State University, San Bernardino Phone: (909) 880-7281 email: wwong@wiley.csusb.edu
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